Are kundalini and hell fire the same thing? Think about it a minute. Kundalini: the intense fire in the body that’s felt by people practicing advanced stages of yoga meditation. It’s explained by the gurus as an opening of the seven energy centers that are situated along the spine. The opening of each one supposedly correlates with greater spiritual power.

But what is the experience of people who actually have kundalini? Do they describe it as an opening to greater power? No, they typically describe it as “a feeling of being incinerated” or “eaten alive” or “I feel I’m being torn apart and there will be nothing left of me.” One person told me, “It feels like my ego is being completely destroyed, like God is murdering me.” These are not the descriptions of people opening to greater spiritual power – at least not power that is theirs to own or control.

Rather it seems that kundalini, as it is commonly experienced in its intense phases, is a kind of devouring. Who is doing the devouring? The gurus tell us kundalini is the life force, coiled like a snake at the bottom of the spine. They tell us to imagine the snake uncoiling and rising in our spine, and that this will trigger kundalini and resulting spiritual enlightenment.

Yet we know the snake is a symbol of the so-called gods who historically have sought to control the human race. We find it as a sacred symbol in the ancient Egyptian mysteries, in Hindu Shiva and Kali worship, and in other religious traditions. The gods and the snake have long been intertwined.

Is it possible that when a person imagines a snake uncoiling from the base of their spine, rising and undulating up their back, that they are actually inviting in another entity to possess them? Does “the snake” rise along their chakras (the spinal spiritual energy centers), devouring them and/or transforming them into the snake’s own energy system?

People experiencing intense kundalini describe it as fiercely painful, and they typically feel powerless to turn the fire off. The so-called Indian saint Amma (Ammachi), better known as “the hugging saint,” claims that her “enlightenment” was ushered in through kundalini so intense she had to submerse herself for hours in water for days at a time. When the transformation is complete, the seeker is said to have become a pure vessel of God, through whom the Infinite speaks and moves in the world. I propose that, in fact, the person is a vessel of something else – the snake-god they allowed to take them over.

My distrust of kundalini as something good is related to another thought that dawned on me recently: is the hell that supposedly exists for some people after death actually a seemingly perpetual experience of intense kundalini? Hell is said to be eternal fire, but how can a spirit burn in fire, when fire is physical and a spirit has no physical body? Surely the fire being spoken of is spiritual in nature, and what is kundalini except spiritual fire? It has its physical element, but is a physical body necessary for kundalini to burn? Surely it could burn an astral body (spirit) as easily as a physical one, under the right conditions.

Those conditions exist in the case of a person who dies and considers himself unworthy of salvation, a person so riddled with self-doubt and guilt that he never makes it to the heavenly worlds. Instead, he succumbs to the messages of dark spirits who visit him, feeding on his self-doubt and fear. They tell him he is damned, confirming his worst suspicions. They stage a “judgment day,” officially condemning the soul to the fires of hell. The soul accepts the scenario as truth, as the decision of God, totally believing he deserves to suffer for his sins.

And then the fire begins. The dark spirits start to feed on him. His chakras burn to the point where he desires oblivion, but there’s nothing he thinks he can do. He is getting what he deserves, he thinks, and is helpless to be saved. So he suffers, much like Prometheus in the Greek myth whose liver was devoured by an eagle each day, growing back at night, only to be devoured again the next day by the same eagle, on and on through eternity.

The scenario can be changed if the soul comes to realize that he himself is allowing the devouring to occur and that therefore he himself can stop it. No one can feed on him without his permission, a permission he granted when he judged himself unworthy of God and of happiness. If he changes his self-judgment, his fate will change as well. God’s love can only reach him when he opens the door.

If you have a loved a one who left this life afflicted with self-doubt and feelings of guilt, someone you’ve had dreams about being in a bad place on the other side, that person is very possibly in a very dark place right now and needs your help. Through the bond of love, your thoughts can reach this person wherever he is and talk to him. You need to reason with him about his self-judgment.

Ask if his belief that God has ordained his intense suffering makes sense. Ask him what he ever did that was bad enough to deserve eternal fire. Give him examples of other people who’ve done far worse things, and ask if he thinks a good and loving God would consign such a person to hell or if God would understand that person’s actions came from intense pain, and love and forgive him. Get the person to see that if he himself can feel compassion and understanding for such an individual, and would never consign such a one to hell, that surely God, whose love and understanding are greater than ours, would never damn such a person. And if God would not damn that hypothetical worse person, how could God damn your loved one, whose guilt is less?

Talk to your loved one as if he is there in the room with you, and reason with him until he can see this. Shout at him if you need to and tell him you will not allow him to sit here and rot like this. Tell him you are bonded forever, and that you need his help, from the other side, his influence in your life. Tell him the other people on earth whom you both love need him. Get mad at him, but get his attention. Tell him you aren’t going to stop coming around and bugging him until he gets good and fed up with his condition and decides to get over it.

Explain that if it clearly wasn’t God who put him here, then someone else clearly did. He has been had, deceived. Dark spirits who like to feed on self-doubting people took advantage of his doubt and convinced him he deserved to burn and suffer. Explain that once he grasps that, and realizes God doesn’t want him here, that he can walk away from the current arrangement. His mind is his prison, and the key is his own understanding. Like Alice in Wonderland, pursued by the Red Queen’s army, who sees the soldiers turn into playing cards and fall lifeless to the floor, so will your loved one find his nightmare dissolve when he discovers it all is caused by his own belief system. Help him see the illogic of what he believes about what he deserves, and he will become free. Even if he did some very bad things, explain that he has suffered enough now, that everything is forgivable when we are truly sorry. Explain that restitution for wrong-doing is not made by suffering but by returning to do good toward the people we have wronged.

When the one you love sees this, the chains will fall from his mind, and he will easily step out of the fires of hell or purgatory. I share this because of an experience I had with a loved one of my own. Reasoning out the truth of the human situation, and loving one another through the perils we find ourselves in, is the path to human freedom, whichever side of the veil we are on. No gods or channeled beings or gurus or saints are going to save us. All those entities have agendas of control and only pretend to be friends of humanity.

It’s up to us to stop looking to other-worldly beings for our answers, to assess our condition for ourselves, and to do something about it. When we stop allowing “spiritual entities” to determine the direction of our lives, we become spiritually mature – driving the vehicle of our own life, our own destiny. Then we can boldly say, with the poet William Henley, “I am master of my fate, and I am captain of my soul.”